


When I Was Done Dying

by shakina



Category: Ao no Exorcist | Blue Exorcist
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-28
Updated: 2018-04-10
Packaged: 2018-11-20 10:31:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11333964
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shakina/pseuds/shakina
Summary: In one universe, Shiro Fujimoto takes home two newborn babies – one human, one demon, both sons of Satan. He raises them both oblivious to their heritage and they grow up loved by each other, their adoptive father, and countless others.This is not that story."I can't raise a demon," Shiro looked up from the child's smiling face and at Mephisto. "As a priest and an Exorcist, I can't do it."





	1. Chapter 1

The air was still, and as frozen as the snow Shiro was standing on. Next to him, Mephisto was staring down into the entrance of the cave, thoughtful eyes turning from it to Shiro himself. He met the stare with one of his own.

 

Mephisto moved first, breaking the serenity by taking a determined step forwards. Shiro hesitated; it felt wrong to disturb the stillness that the cold air offered. Mentally shaking himself, he followed Mephisto down the slope.

 

The cave was dimly lit by torches adorning the walls. The ground was dry and the air as cold as it had been outside. It seemed impossible that anything could grow there, but there in the middle of the cavern was an arrangement of beautifully blooming flowers of all colours. And in the middle of it, lay an exhausted looking Yuri Egin, two newborn babies cradled in her arms.

 

Yuri looked up at their entrance and smiled tiredly. “Shiro.”

 

Shiro felt terror gripping his heart; she looked close to death, and even if her and her child's death had been his goal coming there, he knew to his bones he could never harm her. To have her die just when he'd realised that – well, fate would only be so cruel.

 

“Yuri...” Shiro trailed off, unable to offer comfort. He couldn't find the words that wouldn't make him sick to his stomach, that wouldn't taste like ashes on his tongue.

 

“Shiro,” she continued, as if she hadn't even heard him. “Look at my little boys, Shiro. Aren't they adorable? I call the one with the flames Rin, and the pale one is Yukio.”

 

Only then did Shiro finally look down at the babies cradled in Yuri's arms. They were small, smaller than Shiro thought should be possible. Yuri was right in her assessment of the one on the right – he really was pale. He was asleep, tiny brow furrowed deeply. The freckles sprinkled across his face reminded Shiro of the one's dotted beneath Yuri's eyes. Looking at him, you would never guess he was the son of Satan.

 

Almost reluctant, Shiro shifted his gaze to the left and onto the one Yuri called _Rin_. The blue flames engulfing him didn't seem to bother the small child at all. Shiro hated him for it.

 

Shiro looked at him, and he saw bodies dropping one by one, consumed by the same blue flames. He saw the eyes of his colleagues, of his _friends_ , completely burned out of their sockets as their bodies and souls crumbled under Satan's presence. He saw a _parasite_ taking over the bodies of innocent exorcists, some of them barely out of the academy, too young to have their lives ended at the whim of a monster. He looked at the blue flames, and he saw mass funerals, far too many people to be mourned individually.

 

Shiro wouldn't let it happen again. Releasing a shaky breath, he drew Kurikara.

 

He looked down at Yuri; her chest had stopped rising and falling, but her eyes were open, looking down at her two children even in death. She had stopped breathing while Shiro wasn't paying attention, and the thought caused bile to rise to the back of his throat. Shiro felt he owed it to her somehow, to scorch her last moments into his head, and he had _failed_.

 

Breaths shaking with the threat of tears, Shiro looked down once again. The demonic child, _Rin,_ was smiling up at him, gummy and carefree, oblivious to the fact _he_ was the reason Yuri had just died. If Yuri had never gotten pregnant with Satan's children, she'd still be alive. She's be able to smile at him, or scowl, or tell him once again that demons and humans could coexist. Shiro would take anything in that moment, but he knew he'd never get that, all because of the child smiling up at him from the blue flames of Satan.

 

The sword wavered as he lifted it, Shiro's shaking hands unable to steady it. He raised it above his head, piercing tip directly above Rin's small chest. Shiro pressed the blade against the baby's chest, his breaths harsh and loud in the otherwise silent cave. He tried to convince himself to just push against the swords hilt, to get it over with quickly. His arms stayed stationary, refusing to believe they wouldn't simply shatter upon impact if he dared even move. Yuri's eyes were still open, still watching as he tried to kill her child.

 

Making a wounded noise and squeezing his eyes shut, Shiro let the sword fall to his side. “I can't do it.”

 

Mephisto made a curious noise. “What do you intend to do with them? Yuri took care of herself, but that still leaves two major complications.”

 

“I,” Shiro swallows. “I don't know.”

 

“Hm,” Mephisto rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “You could always adopt them, if it comes to it.”

 

“What?” Shiro couldn't believe what the demon headmaster was saying. “Adopt the sons of Satan?”

 

Mephisto shrugged, affable as ever. “It was just a suggestion. Besides, they're not just Satan's sons – they're Yuri's, too. But if you don't want to take them in and you can't bring yourself to kill them, we could always just leave. Let nature or demons take them.”

 

Could he do it? Could Shiro really leave two newborn babies in a cave to die from the harsh weather? Would he be able to live with himself? But could he raise the sons of Satan? No, Shiro immediately decided. The one with the blue flames, Rin, could never be trusted around the other priests at the church. He was a demon through and through, that much was clear by just looking at him.

 

But Shiro still couldn't kill him, so he had no other choice.

 

In one universe, Shiro Fujimoto takes home _two_ newborn babies – one human, one demon, both sons of Satan. He raises them both oblivious to their heritage and they grow up loved by each other, their adoptive father, and countless others.

 

This is not that story.

 

"I can't raise a demon," Shiro looked up from the child's smiling face and at Mephisto. "As a priest and an Exorcist, I can't do it."

 

"So you'll kill one, and take the other? Harsh, Shiro. I never took you for the heartless type. Nevertheless, the choice is yours, of course."

 

Shiro hesitated. He looked down at the two babies. The one engulfed in blue flames was still smiling up at the priest, oblivious to the danger he was in. The sword in his hands grew heavy in his hands, Shiro's guilt weighing it down. Eventually, he sheathed Kurikara and slung the sword across his back. Tentatively, afraid of disturbing Yuri's body, Shiro leaned down and gently picked up Yukio. The baby's eyes stayed closed, though he shifted around as Shiro settled him in his arms.

 

Shiro turned to exit the cave, Mephisto leading the way. Almost against his will, Shiro looked back once more at the baby he was leaving behind to die. The boy's intense blue eyes seemed to meet and hold Shiro's. The exorcist broke his gaze first, forcing himself to face forward once more and finally leave.

 

As he left, Shiro noted that Rin had stopped smiling.

 


	2. Chapter 2

Yukio is five when he first asks his adoptive father about the demons. Father Shiro brushes off his worries and assures the young boy that monsters aren't real, and that he'll stop seeing them eventually if he ignores them. Yukio takes the advice to heart, and learns to ignore the hoard of small (and sometimes not so small) monstrous creatures that he sees everywhere. He also learns to ignore the concerned looks that his adoptive father begins giving him right after he brought it up.

 

Though he stops talking about the horrible monsters all around, Yukio still struggles to make friends. People avoid making eye contact with him when he passes them in the streets. More than once he's heard Mrs Anderson whispering about the 'poor Father's crazy son', though he ignores her, just like he ignores the disfigured-looking black wolf following her home.

 

(And when Mrs Anderson shows up dead in her own house a couple weeks later, claw and tooth marks mangling her body, Yukio ignores that, too.)

 

* * *

 

He's barely seven when Yukio is forced to acknowledge that he isn't going to stop seeing monsters everywhere he looks, that they aren't going anywhere, no matter how much he wills it.

 

The monster attacks him when he's walking home from school. If it weren't for the decaying flesh hanging off of splintering bones, Yukio would say it looked like a dog. What's left of it's muzzle curls in a snarl before it lunges at him. Yukio falls back, head hitting the pavement as the monstrous form collides solidly with his chest, instead of his throat. The momentary relief he gets from not dying is immediately decimated when the monster stands up and looms over him. Yukio closes his eyes in anticipation, resigned to his fate.

 

Before sharp teeth can pierce his skin, the weight above him leaves. Cautiously, Yukio opens his eyes. The beast's hot breath had fogged up his glasses, but Yukio can clearly see the blurry figure of his attacker with a man standing over it. Yukio uses the edge of his sweater to wipe his glasses as he sits up, watching the sight in front of him avidly. With his cleared glasses, he can see that the man who had saved him is Father Shiro, and he's chanting something in what Yukio recognises as Latin. With surprise, he realises his father's chantings were a Bible verse. He doubts a parable would help them escape with their lives, and wonders what his father thought he was doing. Whatever it was, it looked like it was working. Yukio saw the monster flinch with every word out of the priests mouth, it's already rotting flesh disintegrating as he watches.

 

As the monster crumbles to dust, Shiro finishes his recitation and meets Yukio's eyes.

 

“What – what was that?” is all Yukio manages to stutter out.

 

Shiro stares intently into his eyes, expression empty and apathetic. Then, almost as if Yukio had imagined it, the expression is gone, replaced by his father's normal kindly smiling visage.

 

“That was a demon, Yukio. I read it's Fatal Verse to kill it.” Shiro steps forward to offer him a hand. Yukio takes it as his father continues talking. “It can't hurt you anymore.”

 

“You saved me,” Yukio can still feel his hands shaking with the adrenaline that has flood his system.

 

Shiro's eyes crinkle as he smiles. “Course I did, brat. S'what I'm here for, right?”

 

Yukio can't find the words to describe how he feels, a mix of awe and betrayal clouding his mind. On one hand, Shiro has just saved his life; he has no doubt that if Shiro hadn't shown up when he did, Yukio wouldn't even be alive. Shiro was his father, someone he loved and trusted. But that made the acid betrayal racing down Yukio's spine all the more painful. His father had lied years ago when he said that monsters weren't real. They were real and, because of his fathers words when he was five, Yukio had completely ignored them. Shiro let him live his life thinking he was insane, afraid to even talk about the horrifying things he saw daily.

 

Seeing the turmoil on his adoptive son's face, Shiro's expression softens further. “How about I explain everything over hot chocolate? C'mon, Yukio, let's go home.”

 

* * *

 

Yukio is in his first year of exwire training when he's handed a piece of paper with a summoning circle drawn on it.

 

“Now,” the professor, Mr Neuhaus, begins to explain to the students around him. “not all exorcists have a natural affinity for summoning demons, and this lesson will serve to find those of you who are.”

 

He explains to them how to use the pins he'd given them to draw their blood across their paper.

 

“Say the first words that come to your mind.”

 

The Tamer demonstrates by slicing a cut across his hand, letting the blood fall onto the circle drawn on the floor, and chanting. Wind begins whipping around the classroom, ruffling Yukio's dark hair. He struggles to see as a gangly figure seems to step out of the impromptu gale, seemingly held together only by stitches. Awed, Yukio and his classmates watch as the demon stumbles forwards. Yukio recognises it as Nuberius demon from his extensive studies, but he has never seen one before. In fact, the only demons he's gotten to see so far are the goblins that were summoned to give temptaints to the students without them.

 

“Now you try.”

 

They go around in a circle, each taking a turn to try summoning a demon. Only one of his classmates has managed to succeed by the time it's Yukio's turn.

 

As soon as he jabs the needle in his finger, Yukio feels the words itching at the back of his throat, as if eager to meet the air. Yukio recoils from the feeling immediately. He gets the feeling that, should he say the words that he doesn't yet know, but feel, his life would be irreparably changed. The words on the tip of his tongue can't yet form into any tangible line of thought that Yukio could understand, but he knows that if he let them leave his mouth, they would make perfect and complete sense. He has no doubt that he can summon a demon; the words just on the precipice of being something amazing, should he let them fall.

 

Yukio stares down at the blood welling up on his thumb, them up at Neuhaus. “I can't think of anything to say.” Yukio offers with a self-deprecating smile.

 

Neuhaus stares intently at Yukio for a moment, as if sensing the lie. In the end, the lecturer allows the moment to pass, and moves onto the next student. Yukio doesn't know why his teacher doesn't press the issue and call him out on his lie, but he's grateful.

 

(Years later, Yukio will understand why his teacher let the lie slide, and he'll wish he didn't.)

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to anyone who left comments or kudos. They make me feel the way that cute dogs do :)


	3. Chapter 3

"Mr Okumura, what do we do?" Koneko demands, eyes bright with terror.

 

"Kamiki isn't waking up!" Shiemi yells.

 

"None of Ryuuji's fatal verses are working on it," Shima adds in from the ground.

 

The Abduxel demon howls behind him as if in victory.

 

Yukio is having something of a bad day.

 

 

* * *

 

The day had started normally enough, with Yukio handing his class of six back their tests, and then teaching them the merits and flaws of some weapons when fighting demons. After his lesson, Yukio had dismissed them to Mr Tsubaki's class, where the older professor had led them through a number of self defence moves to use against demons that secrete slime. _A normal day by any standards_ , Yukio thinks despondently, looking at the disaster currently in front of them.

 

The large Abduxel demon had somehow managed to break through the wards around the school, and had headed straight for the exwire class, its three large heads howling in victory when it spotted them. The large beast had charged towards them, the ground shaking with each of it's steps. Takara, on first seeing the demon, had calmly offered to fetch the headteacher and Yukio, happy to get rid of his strange student, who would have no doubt been useless in battle, had agreed.

 

Within fifteen minutes, Mephisto had evacuated the main school, claiming there had been a gas leak – Yukio still wonders when that ruse will stop working or, more likely, the school will simply be shut down as a safety hazard. The demon headmaster has had to use that same lie three times since the school year had started, just to cover up the suspicious activities of Yukio's class. It seems as if whenever trouble is around, his students are in the middle of it. The worst thing is that it isn't even their fault – Yukio has seen trouble fall repeatedly into their laps – once literally, when that Reaper had broken free and leaped directly onto the circle of picnicking exwires.

 

In the end, Yukio has to account their current demon infestation to his students' terrible bad luck. There really isn't any other explanation for the Abduxel demon presently roaring at him as he struggles to reload the last magazine into his gun while his class lies behind him, either incapacitated or tending to those who are. Tsubaki is useless after taking a handful of claws to his stomach, Mephisto is busy controlling the crowd of oblivious students outside the school, and Neuhaus is fuck-knows-where. Basically, they're up shit creek without a paddle, hell, without a fucking boat.

 

Yukio empties a clip of bullets into the demon, but they don't even faze it. Glancing desperately back at his students, panic grips his heart. Only three of them are able to stand, and Ryuuji is too busy chanting Bible verses to be any help in a fight. That leaves Shiemi and Koneko, with Kamiki unconscious and Shima bleeding profusely from a cut at his hip. Their chances aren't good and he desperately needs to get Mr Tsubaki to the medical ward if he wants the teacher to live.

 

Yukio feels as if his eyes are being led by some unseen force when they land on the square of paper clutched in Kamiki's unconscious hand. He can't see it, but he knows that there's a summoning circle scrawled there. Almost without his consent, Yukio's body moves towards the passed out girl, quickly kneeling at her side and peeling her fingers from the paper as Shiemi watches him in startled confusion.

 

Yukio stares down at the paper for a moment, before a roar from the Abduxel demon spurs him into motion, drawing the small blade from his inside coat pocket and slicing it across his wrist.

 

“Yuki?” Shiemi speaks up, staring up at him in confusion. “I didn't know you were a Tamer.”

 

Yukio doesn't answer, can't even bring himself to meet her eyes for some reason. He keeps his eyes to the blood pooling along the cut across his wrist, cherry red and dripping down his wrist and across his palm until it drips from the tips of his fingers onto the small summoning circle. Yukio doesn't think, just says the first words to come to his mind, eager to fall from his lips like overripe fruit, just as they were years ago.

 

“'From the other side of the coin,

Blood to blood, I summon thee.'”

 

The words rip through him deeper than any bullet or blade could ever hope to reach. They're forced from his throat, leaving the sharp taste of blood on his tongue. Something within him settles as he watches blue flames flare all around him, reaching towards him and flaring high into the air. Yukio realises with detached disbelief that before this moment, he hadn't known he was incomplete.

 

A humanoid shape emerges from the blue flames. Without conscious thought, Yukio reaches out to him before he regains motor control and snatches his arm back to his side. The demon engulfed in flames looks at him curiously, deep blue eyes intent on him and smirking lips revealing the edges of fangs. He's young, maybe even younger than Yukio, noticeable shorter, too. He just looks like any regular kid, and Yukio would think he'd messed up the summoning somehow, if it wasn't for the fangs, pointed ears, tail, and _flames of Satan_. Those are kinda hard to ignore.

 

The demon looks back at Yukio, eyeing him up and down with childlike curiosity. _He doesn't seem like a demon,_ Yukio muses as the boy looks openly at the gun still in his hand with cautious eyes.

 

“Where am I?” Yukio flinches when the demon speaks, his voice surprisingly soft.

 

Yukio clears his throat and opens his mouth to speak, but before he can, the demon continues.

 

“Why am I here? Why does no one seem concerned that there's a man bleeding out right there, and is that a dead body? No, never mind, she moved, phew. And why is no one fighting the huge motherfucker demon over there?”

 

Yukio gapes at him momentarily, but the demon has already turned away from him, staring uneasily at the Abduxel demon.

 

“I-” Yukio tries again when his voice cracks. “I'm out of ammo, and everyone else is incapacitated. That's why I summoned you.”

 

A look of surprise briefly flashes across his face before the demon regains control of his expression. “Is that so? In that case, I better kill that thing.”

 

The flame covered demon snaps his fingers and opens a Gahenna Gate. Yukio jerks forwards automatically to stop him, unsure of what exactly he plans to do, but the demon just gives him a wry look and pulls a short sword out of the Gate. Yukio pulls back, feeling foolish. He doesn't know what he would have done, anyway. He's out of ammo, out of weapons, out of ideas. Summoning the demon had been his last resort, so if it did decide to attack them, Yukio would be helpless to stop him. Luckily, it doesn't look like the demon has any intention to attack anyone.

 

Well. He says _anyone_ but the thought barely flashes through his mind before the demon is holding his sword up and charging at the Abduxel demon with reckless abandon, a tinkling laugh of sheer glee following behind him like bells. Yukio wonders if the demon is about to attempt to attack the demon from the ground, but just a he reaches the Abduxel's first set of legs, he leaps into the air. The sword in his hand, what Yukio now recognises as a wakizashi, flashes through the air so quickly that the sunlight glinting off it's edge is the only thing that allows Yukio's eyes to catch it. The demon falls gracefully back to the ground, a spray of blood in the wake of his blade. Landing gracefully on the balls of his feet, the demon grins up at the Abduxel.

 

“C'mon, you giant lizard, you gotta fight back for me to take any pleasure out of this.”

 

The Abduxel roars in fury, the force of it actually pushing the smaller demon back a few inches. Yukio holds his breath, unsure of why he's so concerned for the flaming demon at the Abduxel's feet. _Maybe I feel responsible because I summoned him,_ Yukio thinks to himself. It would make sense. He's seen Tamers grow incredibly attached to their Familiars before. Maybe Yukio would be one of them.

 

It doesn't matter why he is so concerned; he just needs to find some way to help. Yukio gets the feeling that, should something happen to the blue-flamed demon, something terrible will happen. He isn't ready to take that risk; Yukio's instincts are never wrong.

 

This isn't just another thing he can ignore. Yukio drops his useless guns, picks up the unconscious Shima's Khakkhara, and charges towards the two demons locked in battle.

 


End file.
